Panasonic reveals BDT300 3D Blu-ray player

At Panasonic's annual convention in Munich, Germany, the company has revealed the DMP-BDT300 - its first 3D Blu-ray disc player. Panasonic is making as hard a push towards 3D as any, and wants to be able to provide end-to-end capabilities for shooting movies in 3D, recording them onto 3D Blu-ray, and then showing them off on massive 3D televisions.

The machine features Panasonic's UniPhier LSI chip, which the company reckons will be able to cope with the throughput required to display nearly twice the information as a regular Blu-ray movie. It outputs in full HD and also features a selection of high-end image processing technologies to both bring out the detail in a Blu-ray, and upscale a DVD so it doesn't look terrible in comparison.

There's also a pile of networking functionality - there's Panasonic's own Vieracast platform, which is rolling out with a few new partners, there's DLNA capability for home network streaming, and there's also the ability to plug in a proprietary WLAN adaptor, if you just can't get a network cable to where your player happens to be.

There's slots for USB sticks and SD cards, which can play back JPEG, DivX Plus HD and MP3, and AVCHD, MPEG2 and JPEG content respectively. There's also twin HD-out sockets, so that you can dedicate one to audio and one to video, should you so desire. We saw it booting up in just half a second, too - reducing one of the biggest issues with recent Blu-ray players.

We don't have any UK pricing or availability just yet, but as soon as we hear something, we'll let you know.